A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a finger guide and has particular, although not exclusive, relevance to the employ of such guides in fingerprint recognition systems, access control systems and the like.
B. Description of the Related Art
The need to accurately position a finger in order to examine its fingerprint is well known. The reason for this is that in, say, an access control environment, where the fingerprint under examination will be compared with a library of known fingerprints, unless the fingerprint is accurately aligned with the apparatus providing the examination in strict accordance with the same alignment as used for supplying the initial fingerprint in the library, then a match may not be recognised by the access controller even though the same fingerprint is actually present.
Solutions to this problem do exist, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,053,228.
In this document a "fingerpress" is described. This fingerpress comes about when a finger whose print is to be imaged is pressed against the rear surface of a transparent glass plate and held in a predetermined position thereon. Problems exist with such an arrangement, however. Because the fingerprint is essentially a rectangular cavity providing little or no support to the finger, the onus of accurately positioning the finger against the plate lies firmly with the person whose fingerprint is to be obtained.
A finger guide which allows for automatic accurate and reproducible alignment of a given finger without the need to rely upon the manual dexterity of the person whose fingerprint is to be examined is an attractive proposition. Indeed, this is an object of the present invention.